‘A bookshelf is as particular to its owner as are his or her clothes; a personality is stamped on a library just as a shoe is shaped by the foot,” Alan Bennett once wrote. For a while, e-readers and music streaming appeared set to replace their physical counterparts, but the resurgence in vinyl and printed book sales suggests otherwise. For the past decade, Brighton-based photographic artist Mark Vessey has been capturing the beauty of these objects in a series of photographs: his Collections series documents magazines, books, vinyl records and other assorted items, stacked on top of one another or neatly lined up.

For Vessey, 35, the passion for collecting started with Attitude magazine. Growing up in Chingford, on the outskirts of north-east London, Vessey would pick up the gay lifestyle title every time he was in central London – it wasn’t stocked in Chingford – and it showed him a life outside the “bland, safe area” where he was. The magazine, and its thought-provoking photographs by Nan Goldin and Wolfgang Tillmans, helped him discover a world different from the one he was living in. “I bought it religiously – I would read the magazines and go off to the art exhibitions and learn about different artists,” says Vessey, who went on to study photography at Brighton University. “It became a timeline of my self-discovery and coming out.”

It’s that emotional attachment to tangible objects that I find really interesting. They have a story to tell

His photograph of his Attitude magazine collection – significant both for Vessey personally and for what it represented about queer culture – became the first in the series, and was shown in the Royal Academy’s 2006 summer exhibition. Since then he has scoured flea markets, vintage fairs and eBay to find pop culture phenomena he could turn into artwork: the Face, i-D and LOVE magazines; William Shakespeare, James Bond and Ladybird books; classic vinyl records, perfume bottles.

As the project progressed, friends would volunteer their own collections – including a family friend’s copies of American Playboys – although when it came to the shoot, sometimes they would baulk at the reality of separating from their prized objects. “It’s that emotional attachment to tangible objects that I find really interesting,” says Vessey. “They have a story to tell.”

Inspired by pop art, Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, and “that whole 80s era of trying not to be too clever”, Vessey wants his artwork to be accessible. Using familiar found objects grounds the work in the real world: “They’re iconic, everyday objects that we maybe take for granted, but we do treasure them. We use them – we study them or read them or listen to them – but they have some sort of connection to us, like the vinyls we listen to at certain times in our life.”

By photographing them, Vessey hopes to show the objects in a different light, highlighting their physicality. Shot on medium- and large-format film in a tent in his living room, which doubles up as a studio, the photographs are blown up to large-scale prints, with every single scuff, crease and frayed edge visible. These are not brand-new objects: they have been owned, perhaps by more than one person, and used, dropped, loved, damaged.

Rather than comprehensive, strictly ordered arrangements, much of the composition is subjective: “I have to sit with things and work out how it’s going to be,” Vessey explains. “It’s not about photographing everything that someone has, it’s about making it into a readable, aesthetically pleasing photograph.” Sometimes the order is chronological, but at other times it is about colour or design or typography. Occasionally they are dictated by Vessey’s own “dyslexic order” (for example, a photo of David Bowie vinyl includes his favourite song Let’s Dance four times).

Despite his passion for memorabilia, though, Vessey has learned to be pragmatic. “I collected things, used to line them up and stack them, but eventually I had to shift some of them on.” Apart from his photography books and some carefully chosen magazines, he says, “I try and live quite minimalistically – I think there’s a healthy amount of ephemera to have around us. Otherwise you end up turning into a hoarder.”